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We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom

Amazon.com Price:  $31.00 (as of 12/04/2019 03:01 PST- Details)

Description

For Native Americans, religious freedom has been an elusive goal. From nineteenth-century bans on indigenous ceremonial practices to 20-first-century legal battles over sacred lands, peyote use, and hunting practices, the U.S. government has regularly acted as if Indian traditions were in some way not in point of fact religious and due to this fact not eligible for the constitutional protections of the First Amendment. On this book, Tisa Wenger shows that cultural notions about what constitutes “religion” are a very powerful to public debates over religious freedom.

In the 1920s, Pueblo Indian leaders in New Mexico and a sympathetic coalition of non-Indian reformers successfully challenged government and missionary attempts to suppress Indian dances by convincing a skeptical public that these ceremonies counted as religion. This struggle for religious freedom forced the Pueblos to employ Euro-American notions of faith, a conceptual shift with complex consequences within Pueblo life. Long after the dance controversy, Wenger demonstrates, dominant concepts of faith and non secular freedom have continued to marginalize indigenous traditions within the USA.

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